Excel to CSV with UTF8 encoding [closed]

Answer 1

You can use iconv command under Unix (also available on Windows as libiconv).

After saving as CSV under Excel in the command line put:

iconv -f cp1250 -t utf-8 file-encoded-cp1250.csv > file-encoded-utf8.csv

(remember to replace cp1250 with your encoding).

Works fast and great for big files like post codes database, which cannot be imported to GoogleDocs (400.000 cells limit).

Answer 2

As funny as it may seem, the easiest way I found to save my 180MB spreadsheet into a UTF8 CSV file was to select the cells into Excel, copy them and to paste the content of the clipboard into SublimeText.

Answer 3

Under Excel 2016 and up (including Office 365), there is a CSV option dedicated to the UTF-8 format.

In Office 365, do Save As; where previously one might have chosen CSV (Comma Delimited), now one of the file types you can save as is CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) (*.csv)

Answer 4

I know this is an old question but I happened to come upon this question while struggling with the same issues as the OP.

Not having found any of the offered solutions a viable option, I set out to discover if there is a way to do this just using Excel.

Fortunately, I have found that the lost character issue only happens (in my case) when saving from xlsx format to csv format. I tried saving the xlsx file to xls first, then to csv. It actually worked.

Please give it a try and see if it works for you. Good luck.

Answer 5

For those looking for an entirely programmatic (or at least server-side) solution, I've had great success using catdoc's xls2csv tool.

Install catdoc:

apt-get install catdoc

Do the conversion:

xls2csv -d utf-8 file.xls > file-utf-8.csv 

This is blazing fast.

Note that it's important that you include the -d utf-8 flag, otherwise it will encode the output in the default cp1252 encoding, and you run the risk of losing information.

Note that xls2csv also only works with .xls files, it does not work with .xlsx files.

Answer 6

another solution is to open the file by winword and save it as txt and then reopen it by excel and it will work ISA